I am would like to understand the progress of the alternate prefix overlay toward providing a portage tree for scientific computation on large scientific clusters. Specifically I work with an SGI Altix Cluster and have to maintain up to 252 applications that are custom compiled by hand (actually sort of using a script). These applications consist of a range of applications of a number of different versions all cross compiled against a particular number of versions of gcc and intel compilers.

Being a Gentoo user myself now for 3 years, I have been eagerly watching the progress of the prefixed project as I see it as a way to maintain these applications in a far more intelligent way -- having separate trees for each toolchain. Furthermore, I am a scientist as well and my time is becoming to stretched. Furthermore, the users of the platform do not have root permissions and neither do I, which is just another plus.

As scientific users, use tools such as vtk, paraview, the both the scipy and entought toolsuites (as well as a host of compilers etc to name but a few valuable tools) I am wondering how far down the line it will be before this subset of portage packages might become available? I need to set up a new set of applications as we come up to an upgrade to Suse Enterprise Linux 10, and I am hoping that I can take the next step...

Please repost the first post of this thread on the gentoo-alt@lists.gentoo.org mailing list. I believe there are more users interested in scientific applications._________________Gentoo on a different level